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<h1 id="page_title" class="din1451engschrift"><small>Notes from the
Frontlines of Venezuela’s Social War</small></h1>
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<div class="field-item even">by George Ciccariello-Maher<br>
<small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.warscapes.com/opinion/notes-frontlines-venezuela%E2%80%99s-social-war">http://www.warscapes.com/opinion/notes-frontlines-venezuela%E2%80%99s-social-war</a></small></small><br>
<br>
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<p
style="margin: 0px; font-family: Verdana; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 13px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; -x-system-font: none;">“In
their housing developments</p>
<p
style="margin: 0px; font-family: Verdana; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 13px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; -x-system-font: none;">they
placed first, broken bottles on top of their walls,</p>
<p
style="margin: 0px; font-family: Verdana; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 13px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; -x-system-font: none;">then,
barriers and armed guards,</p>
<p
style="margin: 0px; font-family: Verdana; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 13px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; -x-system-font: none;">barbed
wire, bars, attack dogs,</p>
<p
style="margin: 0px; font-family: Verdana; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 13px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; -x-system-font: none;">and
now, triple-wired electric fences</p>
<p
style="margin: 0px; font-family: Verdana; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 13px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; -x-system-font: none;">like
a Nazi camp… [but]</p>
<p
style="margin: 0px; font-family: Verdana; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 13px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; -x-system-font: none;">the
concentration camp is the street,</p>
<p
style="margin: 0px; font-family: Verdana; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 13px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; -x-system-font: none;">the
barrio hills and poverty,</p>
<p
style="margin: 0px; font-family: Verdana; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 13px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; -x-system-font: none;">the
dust and the junk,</p>
<p
style="margin: 0px; font-family: Verdana; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 13px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; -x-system-font: none;">where
they live, God willing… </p>
<p
style="margin: 0px; font-family: Verdana; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 13px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; -x-system-font: none;">-
François Migeot, “Who divides the country?”</p>
<p
style="margin: 0px; font-family: Verdana; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 13px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; -x-system-font: none;"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Venezuela is a society at war. There is
no need to sugarcoat this fact, in part because it is nothing new. But
against those voices who would insist that it was president Hugo Chávez
and the Bolivarian Revolution that divided Venezuela into two warring
camps, it must be said: the camps already existed; the Revolution has
simply revealed them.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>On the Virtues of Open War</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Sometimes, often, open war is
preferable to its opposite. I don’t call that opposite “peace” because
of the need to destabilize this all-too-common, all-too-easy
opposition. No, this war is nothing new. Instead, it is a question of
rendering visible the war that already exists, that has existed, and
that continues unabated. Whereas Frantz Fanon famously diagnosed
colonial society as Manichean, as cut into two, inhabited by two deadly
opponents whose enmity is as clear as day, things are rarely so clear
in ostensibly postcolonial Latin America.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The war has been going on for many
decades, even centuries, but from the 1960s to the 1980s it remained
largely concealed under a blanket of petrodollars. Occasionally, it was
measured in bullet-ridden corpses: in the sporadic guerrilla struggle
of the 1960s and in state-sponsored massacres like <span
style="color: rgb(0, 0, 128);"><a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantaura_Massacre" target="_blank"><span
style="color: rgb(0, 0, 128);">Cantaura</span></a></span> (1982), <span
style="color: rgb(0, 0, 128);"><a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yumare_Massacre" target="_blank"><span
style="color: rgb(0, 0, 128);">Yumare</span></a></span> (1986), and <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_of_El_Amparo"
target="_blank"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 128);">El Amparo</span></a>
(1988). But most would agree that this war became absolutely undeniable
on February 27th, 1989, in the popular, anti-neoliberal rebellion known
as the Caracazo and the massacre of massacres that followed.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">What former president Rafael Caldera
called the “showcase window for Latin American democracy” was
irreparably shattered, and no quantity of rhetoric could repair it. The
events of 1989 begat Chávez’s failed 1992 coup, and 1992 begat his
eventual election in 1998. Suddenly, wealthy elites were wondering
aloud what had happened to their <a
href="http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/theory_and_event/v013/13.1.ciccariello-maher.html"
target="_blank"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 128);">powerful myth of
Venezuelan harmony</span></a>. To lose the comforting myth of one’s own
magnanimity was one thing, but to lose power to a dark-skinned brute
was another thing altogether.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">As the Venezuelan anthropologist <a
href="http://www.ciudadccs.info/?p=12533" target="_blank"><span
style="color: rgb(0, 0, 128);">Jacqueline Clarac recently put it</span></a>,
“Venezuela has always been polarized,” but this has simply been
“invisibilized.” She continues, “At present, we could say that the
dominant classes, who have always been on the side of the dominator,
have been displaced in this process, and this has been very traumatic
for them.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Where there had been one Venezuela,
there were now two, but this was not a clean division of the existing à
la Mao. Rather, it was the reappearance of the invisibilized, the
reemergence of those who had been systematically excluded from
Venezuelan politics. A simple glance at the television, the halls of
power, a beauty pageant, and even the voting rolls in the 1990s would
make it perfectly clear that exclusion was a structuring principle of
this “harmonious” Venezuelan reality. Rather than mere division, an
entire sector of Venezuelan society has <em>come into being</em> since
1989.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>From the Part to the Whole</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Michel Foucault identified social war
as an unrecognized structuring premise of modern society, but one that
is systematically concealed by the unitary logic of sovereignty.
Despite the inherent tension between representative democracy and more
direct forms of grassroots control that the Bolivarian process seeks to
foster, the Bolivarian Revolution is at least in part an electoral
revolution, and to attempt an electoral revolution is to agree to play
the game of popular sovereignty, to struggle for the whole. But this is
a notoriously dangerous game, and most radical parties that have played
it in Venezuela — from <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 128);"><a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movement_for_Socialism_%28Venezuela%29"
target="_blank"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 128);">Teodoro Petkoff’s
MAS</span></a></span> to the late <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 128);"><a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Causa_R" target="_blank"><span
style="color: rgb(0, 0, 128);">Alfredo Maneiro’s Radical Cause</span></a></span> —
have been devoured by its logic. </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Chávez has played the game of popular
sovereignty with more skill than most, walking the fine line of
appealing to the whole while empowering a part: the poor, the
oppressed, the pueblo understood in its most subversive sense. This
peculiarity of the Venezuelan Revolution is best epitomized by Chávez’s
relation to the <a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2008/04/25/embedded-with-the-tupamaros/"
target="_blank"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 128);">most militant of
revolutionary collectives operating in Venezuela</span></a>. These
groups, many of which constitute veritable anti-state communist
militias, actively and consciously reject the holy right of sovereignty
to a monopoly of violence, and while Chávez occasionally scolds them in
public, he also seems to realize that they are his best protection. At
times, however, this game can seem exasperating to sympathizers,
especially when it cuts against demands for more radical
transformation: as longtime revolutionary Roland Denis recently told
me, “Chávez speaks of ‘pulverizing the bourgeois state’ while in many
ways doing the opposite.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Lest we conclude, however, that the
play of popular sovereignty is simply a ruse, that beneath the rhetoric
of unity there lay an ulterior motive of class conflict, it is worth
recalling - as Argentine-Mexican philosopher of liberation Enrique
Dussel has argued - that the struggle of the oppressed and excluded
part is always also a struggle for a new and reconfigured whole, a war
for the sort of harmony that has never existed in Venezuela except as a
governing myth.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>From War of Position to War of
Maneuver</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">I recently returned to Caracas after
four years away, and perhaps the most visually striking indicator of
the city’s transformation is the sprouting up of large apartment
buildings — white and red — under the aegis of Misión Vivienda (Mission
Housing). More revealing than the Venezuelan government’s new
insistence on fulfilling the needs of the homeless, however, is the
location of this housing. Rather than occupying empty spaces at the
periphery of society, these projects have proliferated like unwelcome
but ineradicable mushrooms in mixed and even opposition neighborhoods. <br>
</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">I travel to El Encantado, which despite
translating literally as “enchanted,” is instead the most isolated and
neglected part of Petare, the largest and most dangerous barrio in
Venezuela, and arguably all of Latin America. Here a hydroelectric
plant and train line once nourished the population, but that is all in
the past, and today the only way to reach El Encantado is down a long
and unstable dirt path hundreds of feet above the Guaire River. It used
to be a paradise of sorts, but now the river here stinks of refuse and
is visibly choked with garbage.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Local activists associated with the
youth movement <a
href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/23/us-venezuela-election-ghetto-idUSBRE88M01F20120923"
target="_blank"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 128);">Chávez Es Otro
Beta</span></a> explain to me how, despite four years under both an
opposition mayor and governor (the latter being Henrique Capriles,
Chávez’s opponent in the recent presidential contest), little has
changed. “The opposition doesn’t ever come to this area,” they tell me,
disgusted but hardly surprised. “Capriles wouldn’t dare to show his
face here.” The disregard for El Encantado is even more galling since
it sits across a ravine from the affluent opposition stronghold of El
Hatillo, and from this collapsing dirt road we can see wealthy housing
developments jutting into the horizon from amid otherwise lush
countryside.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">But these activists draw my attention
across this vast geographical and socio-economic gulf to a series of
buildings that is larger and more prominent than most, which I expect
to contain astronomically priced condos. Not so: they have been seized
by Misión Vivienda and are currently being outfitted to house those
displaced from<em> barrios</em> like this one. This is about more than
merely providing housing to the poor and those displaced by the
all-too-frequent mudslides that destroy entire <em>barrios</em> in an
instant. It is about bringing the war to the enemy in a way that
provokes further polarization and the sharpening of political positions
that comes along with it.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">This is, in many ways, the lesson of
the recent electoral results. On October 7, Chávez was re-elected by a
margin of 11 percentage points, a landslide most anywhere on earth, but
for a Revolution that won by 25 percent six years ago, this narrowed
margin reveals a great deal. Is Venezuelan society more clearly divided
into two chunks organized around contrasting political outlooks and
aspirations? The now popular opposition phrase — <em>somos casi la mitad</em>,
“we are nearly half”— certainly suggests as much. </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">As <a
href="http://www.aporrea.org/ideologia/a152392.html" target="_blank"><span
style="color: rgb(0, 0, 128);">one recent commentary put it</span></a>,
these are “not the same votes” as 2006 and 1998, since the socialist
project today is more clearly defined. As a result, the tendency that <a
href="http://books.google.com/books?id=QtQnAAAAYAAJ&q=changing+venezuela&dq=changing+venezuela&hl=en&sa=X&ei=GhiIUKvrDe3p0QHYoIH4DA&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA"
target="_blank"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 128);">Gregory Wilpert
identified</span></a>, according to which “Chávez was elected by the
middle class…and confirmed by the poor,” appears to still hold. But the
same cannot be said of those who voted for Henrique Capriles Radonski
and an opposition which still lacked a coherent alternative program,
and which, if <a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/09/28/the-election-that-matters/"
target="_blank"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 128);">a leaked
governing plan</span></a> is to be believed, continues to disguise its
neoliberal aspirations beneath social democratic rhetoric.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">One thing clearly stands out from the
numbers, however. Venezuela’s presidential race was not a standard
electoral contest on the U.S. model, one in which two parties race to
the center in an attempt to win the soft middle. Although both
candidates occasionally softened their rhetoric to attract the “middle
class,” votes won do not appear to have been at the expense of the
other side, but rather came through the mobilization of new or
previously disaffected voters. Turnout was massive, and while
proportionally Chávez lost 8 percent compared to 2006, he actually won
nearly a million new votes, while Capriles mobilized more than two
million more than his notably uncharismatic predecessor, Manuel Rosales.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>The War Within Chavismo</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">This, however, is not the only, or even
most crucial, lesson of the elections, whose narrower margin cannot be
attributed solely to a laudable sharpening of political positions. The
results also point towards an internal war within the Chavista ranks,
one long simmering but which many expect will come rapidly to a head.
“This is Chávez’s last chance,” one revolutionary tells me without a
hint of hyperbole. Unless revolutionaries can mobilize their base
through radical and effective action, the very survival of the process
will soon be called into question.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Chavismo, according to Roland Denis, is
more than just a run-of-the-mill mass movement: It has become a
veritable “movement of popular struggle” comprising a multiplicity of
forms and initiatives. The source of Chavismo’s energy, however, was
“attacked” by the attempt to centralize it within the United Socialist
Party of Venezuela (PSUV), and as a result of both the internal
dynamics of the party and the “disastrous” experiences of Chavista
governance on a regional level, the movement as a whole is suffering an
internal <em>desgaste</em>, or exhaustion. </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Confronting this <em>desgaste</em> is
not a question of selecting better regional candidates, or about the
question of who will succeed Chávez. Instead, it concerns the problem
of whether or not the constellation of forces will allow radicals to
take the reins of the process, steering it in a way that is at once
revolutionary and democratic. And yet, as Chávez’s health remains in
question, and as December gubernatorial elections quickly approach,
such questions cannot be cast aside.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Of the three main contenders to succeed
Chávez, former soldier <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 128);"><a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diosdado_Cabello" target="_blank"><span
style="color: rgb(0, 0, 128);">Diosdado Cabello</span></a></span> is
widely considered to lead the “endogenous right” - the more
conservative revolutionary forces - and is rumored to be severely
corrupt. While he has proven an electoral failure both in Miranda State
and within the United Socialist Party (PSUV), one anonymous
revolutionary recently quipped to me that “it’s not a question of
electability, it’s a question of the balance of forces, and Diosdado
owns generals, he owns ministries, he has built a powerful machine.”
More importantly, this electoral calculation would shift drastically if
more moderate sectors of the opposition ever decide to throw their lot
in with a centrist Chavista.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">On the other hand, <span
style="color: rgb(0, 0, 128);"><a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El%C3%ADas_Jaua" target="_blank"><span
style="color: rgb(0, 0, 128);">Elías Jaua</span></a></span>, until
recently Chávez’s vice president, has a long history of civilian
militancy with origins in the underground armed struggle of the 1980s
and maintains close relations with grassroots movements today. He is
clearly the choice of the radicals and the youth, and currently faces
off (in what will be a difficult but potentially decisive gubernatorial
race in Miranda State) against none other than Henrique Capriles
Radonski. While Jaua fights a difficult battle, one that Cabello
himself has proven incapable of winning, <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicol%C3%A1s_Maduro" target="_blank"><span
style="color: rgb(0, 0, 128);">Nicolás Maduro</span></a> sits
comfortably as the newly named vice president, his hands unsullied by
electoral races or practical local governance. A former bus driver and
union leader, Maduro holds his cards closer to his chest and, while
politically powerful, has failed to chart a clear path to either the
right or the left (although some suggest the feasibility of a
Jaua-Maduro alliance). </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">For Reinaldo Iturriza, who works
closely with both Jaua and youth movements like Otro Beta that support
him, the challenge is to fundamentally rethink politics from below. The
PSUV will never be fixed, he tells me, unless the movements are able to
generate “an entirely new political logic” rooted in the critique of
representation. “We need to create a new way of doing politics,” he
insists, and the fate of not only the Revolution, but the country,
depends upon it. As Denis puts it: “A powerful confrontation is coming…
As long as we don’t create a popular force capable of winning, we could
lose power tomorrow.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><em><strong>George Ciccariello-Maher</strong>
teaches political theory from below at Drexel University in
Philadelphia. He is the author of We Created Chávez: A People's History
of the Bolivarian Revolution (Duke University Press, 2013), and can be
reached at gjcm(at)drexel.edu.</em></p>
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